a pretty sunny snowy morning

days like this are kinda why we moved here, i think.

unfortunately the road plow was really noisy at 5 am (dan is our human driveway plow) and he and i are drowsy this am.

I'm working from home for an hour then I'm touring a local museum we're thinking of 'collaborating' with. That's in quotes because neither of us knows what specifically that could entail but I never run out of ideas, they're just not always good ones, and I do try to implement them.

and then at some point i try to remember to evaluate whether it's a good idea...

like, ok, i did this rabbit hole journey: investigating eventbrite plug-ins led to wordpress plugin research which included blogger import, and we had some good content on a BlogSpot so I thought it'd be good to bring that content over later, but the thing is.... it doesn't ask where the content will end up GOING..I thought it would? At some point? But it doesn't, you just upload the whole xml and voila. Most of our static pages are a category roll of posts, so importing these with no preexisting category loaded them all to the visit page, and when I deleted them all (aka SAVED to the trashcan) and THEIR categories (which don't save to the trash can) I accidentally deleted the Newsworthy one which is one we wanted to have, and when I put it back I noticed that it had deleted the News section of the site altogether and I couldn't remember where it belonged.

I asked for help from the developer and it took him 2 seconds to show me where it belonged, I added it, fixed a broken link, and I THINK all is back to normal.

There might be a lesson in there like 'be more careful next time'.


Learned a lot about the website meanwhile.... Also discovered I can't really put in metadata for google nonprofit suite on my own.

Also, for funsies, explored the attics and archives. I hadn't been up there yet because I just really didn't have an excuse to do it, but yesterday we made the time. Got some good pictures and some ideas!

ughhhhhhh sunny mornings turn into sleepy afternoons

esp when you end up with 3 meetings and one of them is "outside"

and another is carefully working with a salesrep you're undecided on

and the third - I had to leave the post be for a bit, because the third drove me crazy and I couldn't figure out how to say things in a positive way, even on my own semisecret blog.

The third, drove me nucking futs, because the person we have in charge of Interpretation and Education (which translates to 'meaningful visitor experience') has spent about 90 hours now essentially farting around with experiments for winter camp. Reader, our program is 2 hours. Repeated twice. We told him the 3 things we wanted to do. I literally mean he's spent most of the last going-on-three weeks watching youtube and 'setting up' the lab and practicing his experiments.

So, I'm annoyed at the waste of time with little result, and i could tolerate that if it informed the 'creative process' somehow? Perhaps practice makes perfect?

Yesterday though, my boss/partner put it like this: I'm not wowed. He says that a lot, because his instinct is to be analytical/critical, so take it with a grain of salt, but a) neither was I and b)....

The MAIN PART of this guy's job is not education but interpretation. he's an acclaimed expert in that. And none of the new projects, sort of fun though they were, had any relevance to this particular place - and I feel like that's the POINT of interpretation!

C) I will admit I've noticed he doesn't listen to other people, or anyway doesn't HEAR or understand the first time around. Of course it bugs me when people don't hear my ideas, but it's even worse when they don't hear my DIRECTIONS. (I wanted to take timings and literally practice where things would GO, who was handling, but uh I guess not.)


I would love to be specific, but I can't, and I'm still trying to be positive. (ok so basically it's a science lesson on light, utilizing optical illusions and prisms. we're a museum about industrial history.)

Today, after having my gums scraped, I took the serenity prayer approach and 'changed what I can' which is: I really think it's important for guests to have handouts available. I do not care if they take them home, and it may be a waste of paper, but here's why they matter:
a) people may take them home and remember us
b) in case the presentation goes off the rails the handout is organized
c) it's got the How To directions in case there's more people than the instructor can work with
d) if a parent wasn't present they can see what a kid learned
e) makes us look like we know what we're doing esp if they're consistent

SO, I found something relevant, and made the handouts on the other 2 sections Be Relevant to What We Are Doing. (Sigh. I used the diagram of how workers on the top floor had extra windows because that was the art floor and talked about worker life in the 1800s governed by sunlight & the shift bell rather than electric light, and on the back did vocab for lux/lumens/candelas and comparison with watts/cfls. Also, power and light are somewhat synonymous these days, but this building was water powered (mill wheel) with natural light (solar lighting)!)


I just.... I don't get it.